Liturgy

SACRAMENT PROGRAM

'Family focused, parish-based, catholic school-supported'Do you have a child in Year 3, 4 or 6?"Your unique and indispensable role in your child's Catholic Christian formation is one that both school and parish endorse and support. It is your privilege and responsibility, which follows from your commitment when your child was baptised, to present your child for the sacraments."
John XXIII College prepares children for the various sacraments during the course of this year's religious education programs: Year 3 - Reconciliation, Year 4 - Eucharist, Year 6 - Confirmation. These sacraments are then received in your home parish, the parish community in which you regularly participate.

FAQsI have a daughter/son in Secondary who has not been confirmed. Who should I contact?This frequently occurs when students transfer from overseas or from state schools. In the first instance, contact your parish priest or parish administrator. However if in doubt, email Mary-Anne Lumley (see below).

I know the dates in my parish - shall we just turn up on the day?No, every parish has an enrolment process that needs to be completed in advance. Contact your parish priest or administrator to enrol.

What do I need to take to enrolment?Relevant earlier certificates - eg Baptism, Reconciliation etc.

I have heard that in my parish all students have to attend classes, even if they go to a Catholic school.Yes, each parish is a special and unique community. Some parishes MAY request that students preparing for Sacraments (including students from Catholic schools) attend parish classes or retreats. Check with your own parish for further details.

THIS SUNDAY'S 'GOOD NEWS': 5th Sunday in Lent (John 12:20-33)

"If a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it yields a rich harvest."

The following reflection for this Sunday's Gospel is from Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ, and is printed here, with his kind permission. Fr Andrew is Media Officer for Jesuit Social Services.

To wait for someone to die is a heightened time. When we wait with dying relatives it can be a precious experience that takes us deeply into ourselves. We feel compassion and helplessness, strongly aware of our own mortality and of our inability to delay death.

Recently we felt that as a community, when the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran and their companions were in our mind. We waited with them as they sat between soldiers, waiting to be transported to the island prison. We wait for the date of their execution to be named; we hope against hope that by some miracle they might be spared. Seeing these strong young men and knowing that they could suddenly be killed is deeply disturbing. We become aware of our own vulnerability and journey edgily with them.

We catch that intensity, compassion, vulnerability and sense of a journey to destiny in John's description of Jesus' last days. Jesus' heart is troubled as he knows that his enemies are closing around him and will have him killed. He casts around for ways of grasping the meaning of what will happen. It is like the seed that must be buried in order to grow, flower and fruit. It is God's way that all human beings must walk: life comes out of dying and hope out of being faithful to doing what God asks of us. Jesus's death will be the way that God works for us: we are healed by his wounds and live through his death. It will be the pattern of his disciples' life.

Jesus bets everything - his life and his faithfulness to God's calling - on God bringing life out of his death. And three days later he rises from the dead.

The story of Jesus' death and rising confronts us with the reality of our lives. We are vulnerable and inevitably must endure the small dyings in our lives - the ending of friendships, the loss of friends, the failures to realise our dreams, the flickering of the fires of our ideals, and our debilitating illnesses. And all of us, less publicly than Andrew Chan, Myuran Sukumaran and their companions, are faced with our mortality and the certainty that we shall die. The vulnerable young people with whom we work at Jesuit Social Services meet the challenge of mortality more often than most in their death of so many of their friends and in the uncertainty of their own lives.

The Gospel is about hope because Jesus' rising and the promise that we too shall live trump death and mortality. Neither the little deaths that mark our lives nor the large death that ends them have the last word. They need not to be shrunk from, but lived through because we know that we shall live with Jesus. He is the lighted candle that saves us from cursing the darkness.

PROJECT COMPASSION

COMMUNITY MASS

Next Friday is a special day! Firstly our celebration will start at 7:30am in the Library Courtyard. We will have the readings and procession of Palm Sunday - not to replace parish Palm Sunday masses on Sunday, but to give the students the opportunity to participate more fully, and guide them into Holy Week. Parents and friends are warmly invited. The Mass will be prepared by Year 7 and Year 12 students - we hope that 'buddies' from the first day of term will come to the Mass together and sit with each other.